The White Coat Diaries by Madi Sinha
“People in other, normal jobs might have their computer crash or someone took their hole puncher—that’s their day-to-day office crap. Our day-to-day office crap is death and human suffering.”
Having spent the last twenty-something years with her nose in a textbook, brilliant and driven Norah Kapadia has just landed the medical residency of her dreams. But after a disastrous first day, she’s ready to quit. Disgruntled patients, sleep deprivation, and her duty to be the “perfect Indian daughter” have her questioning her future as a doctor.
Enter chief resident Ethan Cantor. He’s everything Norah aspires to be: respected by the attending physicians, calm during emergencies, and charismatic with his patients. And as he morphs from Norah’s mentor to something more, it seems her luck is finally changing.
But when a fatal medical mistake is made, pulling Norah into a cover-up, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect the secret. What if “doing no harm” means putting herself at risk?
The White Coat Diaries offers a peek behind the curtain, revealing the inner workings of a doctor’s life. It shows the truth of what goes on behind closed doors in a hospital, the unglamorous truth of saving lives. And I’m not gonna lie, it was not exactly an easy pill to swallow. Norah slowly learns the importance of work-life balance, and the book makes the bureaucratic structure of the healthcare system clear. We get to see just how hard our doctors work to keep us safe, and how heavily every mistake weighs on them. Still, seeing how many mistakes occur is bone-chilling. It is no one’s fault exactly; there are just too many patients and far too few doctors. More than anything, The White Coat Diaries made me realize just how fragile the human body is, and that doctors are often just shooting in the dark. It’s not exactly comforting stuff.
As far as the plot goes, there isn’t really one. The “cover-up” does not occur until 75% of the way into the novel (I know because I was reading on my kindle). This means that the first 75% passes by with … no plot. It kind of just flows by like a memoir. The resolution did not sit well with me, and I feel like it left a lot of strings loose.
There isn’t really a clean ending, and characters just drop out of the story. While this happens in real life, it’s pretty disconcerting when it happens in a novel. Interesting stuff does happen throughout the story, but there is no real overarching plot tying it all together. Everything turns sideways in the last 10% of the book, and the book ends rather abruptly. Without giving too much away, it just seemed extremely out of character and sudded. While I understand that Norah is supposed to grow, her final actions do not seem like they belong to her at all.
The characters are all relatable and realistic, but they all seem lightweight and do little to impact the story. We mainly focus on Norah and her struggles with her work, which is the main point of the story after all. We get to hear just how exhausted she is, over and over, until it makes you kind of exhausted with the book itself. There were many points in the book where I genuinely had no idea where the story was going. I was expecting a drama, with a dose of righteousness, but I stumbled into a humdrum expose about the medical industry instead. I feel like the blurb itself was rather misleading, because I just immediately started imagining a rom com.
One of the reasons I picked up this book was because of the representation. The White Coat Diaries fared well on this point, portraying Norah’s struggle with her family in a relatable and understandable way. Sinha weaves in points that all Indian families can relate to, while also making Norah’s mother a real character and not just a stereotypical Indian mom. The mental struggles surrounding the South Asian community are well developed and feel natural rather than forced. At the same time, it never becomes the focal point of the story and is slipped in every now and then as an underlying conflict.
Overall, The White Coat Diaries provides a sneakily harrowing peek into the life of a doctor-in-training and the frustrations that plague her at every step, both personal and professional. While Norah is an inherently interesting character, she is let down by an ultimately underwhelming plot.
Having spent the last twenty-something years with her nose in a textbook, brilliant and driven Norah Kapadia has just landed the medical residency of her dreams. But after a disastrous first day, she’s ready to quit. Disgruntled patients, sleep deprivation, and her duty to be the “perfect Indian daughter” have her questioning her future as a doctor.
Enter chief resident Ethan Cantor. He’s everything Norah aspires to be: respected by the attending physicians, calm during emergencies, and charismatic with his patients. And as he morphs from Norah’s mentor to something more, it seems her luck is finally changing.
But when a fatal medical mistake is made, pulling Norah into a cover-up, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect the secret. What if “doing no harm” means putting herself at risk?
As far as the plot goes, there isn’t really one. The “cover-up” does not occur until 75% of the way into the novel (I know because I was reading on my kindle). This means that the first 75% passes by with … no plot. It kind of just flows by like a memoir. The resolution did not sit well with me, and I feel like it left a lot of strings loose.
There isn’t really a clean ending, and characters just drop out of the story. While this happens in real life, it’s pretty disconcerting when it happens in a novel. Interesting stuff does happen throughout the story, but there is no real overarching plot tying it all together. Everything turns sideways in the last 10% of the book, and the book ends rather abruptly. Without giving too much away, it just seemed extremely out of character and sudded. While I understand that Norah is supposed to grow, her final actions do not seem like they belong to her at all.
The characters are all relatable and realistic, but they all seem lightweight and do little to impact the story. We mainly focus on Norah and her struggles with her work, which is the main point of the story after all. We get to hear just how exhausted she is, over and over, until it makes you kind of exhausted with the book itself. There were many points in the book where I genuinely had no idea where the story was going. I was expecting a drama, with a dose of righteousness, but I stumbled into a humdrum expose about the medical industry instead. I feel like the blurb itself was rather misleading, because I just immediately started imagining a rom com.
One of the reasons I picked up this book was because of the representation. The White Coat Diaries fared well on this point, portraying Norah’s struggle with her family in a relatable and understandable way. Sinha weaves in points that all Indian families can relate to, while also making Norah’s mother a real character and not just a stereotypical Indian mom. The mental struggles surrounding the South Asian community are well developed and feel natural rather than forced. At the same time, it never becomes the focal point of the story and is slipped in every now and then as an underlying conflict.
Overall, The White Coat Diaries provides a sneakily harrowing peek into the life of a doctor-in-training and the frustrations that plague her at every step, both personal and professional. While Norah is an inherently interesting character, she is let down by an ultimately underwhelming plot.
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